


Wildflowers

by strictlyamess



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: :/, Eating Disorders, Heavy Angst, M/M, Song Lyrics, college and beyond, if you're trying to feel happy then this is not the fic for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 20:28:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14028123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strictlyamess/pseuds/strictlyamess
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak is always early, and Richie Tozier is always late.





	Wildflowers

Eddie Kaspbrak was always early to things. This was one of the core facts of his existence; nothing on Earth was going to stop him from leaving his house at least twenty minutes before a normal person would even put on their shoes. It was awkward sometimes, but it was the only way he could settle with the constant and consistent nervous buzz in his head, his arms, and his mind.

The Shakespeare class he took in the second semester of his sophomore year of college was no exception to his rule. Eddie arrived approximately fifteen minutes before nine, chose a seat at the table, took out a notebook, and wrote _‘Shakespeare - Day One’_ neatly on the top of the first page. He wasn’t expecting much from the class, but it counted towards his minor, and it would probably end up being helpful down the line, so he’d figure out how to get through it. (He was majoring in Education and minoring in English, with the intention of getting his teaching certificate for grades 7-12. He’d had a few really exceptional English teachers over the years that had changed his life immensely, and he wanted to be able to return the favor, so to speak.)

The rest of the class started wandering in at five minutes to nine, and the professor arrived at nine on the dot. She was ancient, with a lurid red and blue patterned scarf that she’d probably bought at a random market stall in Italy in the year 83 B.C.E., and Eddie took one look at her and officially gave up hope on the class. They might as well have just named the course ‘An Old Lady’s Personal Anecdotes’, because from the looks of the woman, Eddie could tell that ‘the good old days’ were going to be a popular lecture topic.

She began the class at 9:02. Eddie’s leg began to bounce of its own accord, and after introductions were made (the usual ‘what’s your name, where are you from, preferred gender pronouns’ small talk), he tuned out entirely, turning to his notebook and beginning to doodle flowers under where he’d written _‘Shakespeare - Day One’_. 

At 9:17, the door burst open, and Eddie was jerked from his drawing with such force that he almost fell backwards out of his chair.

The person responsible was a tall, stringy kid with Elvis Costello glasses and a mane of thick, unruly black hair. He glanced around the room, gave a lazy grin, and shuffled around to a seat.

“Richie Tozier,” he said, giving the class an encompassing wave as he pushed towards a redheaded girl in the back. She looked like she’d been saving him a seat. “Sorry I’m late. Alarm and all that.”

“I hope you find a more reliable timepiece in future, Mr. Tozier,” the professor said with a scowl, but Richie wasn’t listening. He was already engrossed in a non-verbal conversation with the redheaded girl, full of smirks on his end and exasperated looks on her end.

Eddie had seen this guy before. He’d been jostled by him, in fact, at the quad party two weeks ago, hard enough to make him spill his drink all down his front. The shirt was one of his favorites, and the red wine had rendered it unsalvageable, so he had spent the rest of the party in something of a fury, looking to find Richie again so as to give him a piece of his mind.

His friend Bill had found him first, and stopped him before anything escalated.

“Glasses, black ha---oh, you mean Richie Tozier?” Bill had said, struggling to hear him through both the loudness of the music and the haze of his drunkenness. “Don’t fight him, dude, he’s crazy. I heard that last year, he was sent to the judicial board for setting up a jello-wrestling ring in the basement of the Emerson building.”

Having Richie in his English class wasn’t enough to salvage it, perse, but Eddie figured that having a little bit of crazy to spice up whatever monotony the teacher threw at them wouldn’t be so bad.

He wasn’t going to talk to Richie, though. He wasn’t about to forgive the wine spill THAT easily.

The next time he was looking up from his doodled flowers, Richie was looking back at him interestedly. He rolled his eyes and pointedly ignored it.

Connecting with Richie Tozier would be more trouble than it was worth.

\----

For the most part, that was how they spent that sophomore spring - Richie and his redheaded friend whispering loudly, and Eddie doodling in his notebook haphazardly, sometimes catching Richie looking back at him and sometimes not. The class was exactly as interesting as Eddie had predicted it would be, which was to say...not at all, and it slipped by as uneventfully. In fact, the whole semester was uneventful, save for a catastrophic weekend when Bill almost got into a fight with some girl’s boyfriend. (Eddie hadn’t been there to see it, but apparently Bill had thought the girl was his own girlfriend Audra from behind, and so had reached to embrace her...and immediately discovered that it was not, in fact, Audra. The girl was furious, and so was her boyfriend.) Eddie was fine with that, though. He needed college to go as seamlessly as possible so that he could convince his mother that he was okay on his own; that he could move out of her house when he graduated.

He hadn't counted on seeing Richie again.

\----

Apparently, just once with the Bard was not enough for Eddie - no, he had a fine arts credit to fulfill, and so his advisor had suggested that he take an Acting Shakespeare course. Eddie had vehemently refused, of course, but his advisor was persistent; she insisted that it was a form of public speaking that would be useful to him down the line. Eventually, she wore him down, and he begrudgingly enrolled in it for the fall.

He should probably have figured that Richie was going to be there.

“Eddie,” he greeted him on the first day of class, looking bewilderingly nerdy as always with his pink Miley Cyrus t-shirt tucked into his blue sweatpants. (There was no way to know how much of this fashion choice was ironic.) Eddie, who had no idea Richie even knew his name (he contributed in Shakespeare class as little as he possibly could), was naturally taken aback.

“Uh.” He looked at Richie’s expectant face, and felt numb. “Richie?”

Richie nodded, satisfied. “Theatre’s not your department, right? I think I’d have remembered seeing you around this building before.”

“Education,” Eddie offered quietly, looking at the floor.

Richie laughed at that - a low, sweet sound- and when he spoke, his voice was warm. “Cute.”

When Eddie looked back up, Richie was gone. He’d crossed the room to go sit with his redheaded friend and a stern looking boy with coiffed amber hair.

Eddie wasn’t sure why he felt disappointed.

The first couple of classes were...excruciating, to say the least. Eddie was a terrible public speaker and had never publicly performed before, so he spent the fifteen minutes before every session panicking in the empty blackbox theatre where class was held. When class WAS in session, Eddie spent most of it waiting for the other shoe to drop; waiting for the theatre kids (Richie) to get annoyed with him and for the professor to lose patience.

That day never came. As it turned out, he wasn’t even the only non-theatre kid in there - coiffed hair kid hadn’t done any on-stage stuff either (he was more comfortable backstage, he said), and a broad guy with impressive facial hair was an architecture major there with his girlfriend, the redhead. (Eddie was surprised that the redhead wasn’t RICHIE’S girlfriend...but he wasn’t upset that she wasn’t, not really at all.) The theatre majors were endlessly patient with them, and by the time October rolled around, Acting Shakespeare had become Eddie’s not-so-secret favorite class.

“And this has nothing to do with Richie,” Bill half-asked after Eddie had gotten carried away talking about it one night.

Eddie almost choked on his dining hall salad. “Richie Tozier?! Dude. Come on.”

He couldn’t have a crush on Richie. Jesus. Richie, who had accidentally eaten pencil lead last class after trying to pull it out of his mechanical pencil with his teeth? Richie, who read sonnets like he was performing stand-up comedy? Fuck no. Couldn’t be.

Besides, Eddie wasn’t even super sure that he was gay. He’d wondered sometimes (often) about it, and had confided in the people he was close with (Bill) that he thought he might not be totally straight, but he’d never felt anything concrete around it. 

Of course, it would probably have helped to have actual experiences to feel concrete about, but Eddie was choosing to focus on his academics for the time being. (That’s the exact line he fed himself every time he felt lonely, and he was sticking to it, so help him God.)

Bill shrugged, looking down at his mediocre slice of pizza knowingly. “If you say so.”

Eddie was sure that Bill’s prediction wasn’t true, but his having said it meant that Eddie thought about it every time he saw Richie, which was the fucking worst. Everything seemed to change between them overnight; one day Eddie was laughing about catching Richie looking at him, the next, he was making eye contact with him and wondering. _What does this mean? Is he flirting with me??_

Even if Richie _was_ flirting with him, there was no way that it could be serious - Richie had a reputation for being...less than serious - but Eddie couldn’t help but think (obsess) about it anyway.

He could almost feel his mother’s icy glare on him every time that Richie smiled in his direction.  
This was nothing if not bad news.

\----

The capstone project for the Acting Shakespeare course was a mainstage Shakespeare show, starring the people in the class. The professor had chosen A Midsummer Night’s Dream for them, and in early November, the cast list went out.

Richie, as expected, was playing Nick Bottom, the comic relief (and literal ass) of the show.

Eddie had a smaller part - or rather, a few small parts. The largest of those was Peter Quince, the long-suffering playwright who wrote plays for Bottom and his crew. Eddie thought it was kind of poetic: art imitating life.

(He also, to his great humiliation, was going to have to play a _fairy_ , but that didn’t bear mentioning.)

Rehearsals for that threw everything into new light. Bantering with Richie was one thing amongst friends, or across the counter of the garish campus cafe (Richie worked there, and had dragged Eddie along after him once or twice to make him a coffee), but on stage there was new electricity to it. Every night, he showed up to the theatre building partially for class, and partially to continue to catalogue the colors of Richie’s eyes as they argued heatedly in Shakespearean prose. There was _fire_ in their interactions now.

It took Eddie until show week to understand what he was feeling.

“Richie really likes you,” Beverly said on the Sunday of tech weekend, as they were grabbing coffees before they descended down to their dressing rooms. Beverly was Richie’s redheaded friend, and incidentally the girl that Bill had almost kissed at the party last year. The more Eddie got to know her and her boyfriend Ben, the more he liked them - and the more he doubted Bill’s assertions that they were going to kill him last spring in the basement of Young Hall.

Eddie nodded, smiling quietly to himself. “Richie’s my friend.”

Beverly looked at him like he’d grown an extra head.

“Richie really likes you,” she repeated slowly.

Eddie was perplexed.

“I...really like Richie?” he tried.

“I think you do,” she said, rolling her eyes and departing to get into her Titania dress. “He thinks you do. But what about you?”

It took all night for Bev’s words to stop bouncing around in his brain, and Eddie only really came to understand what it meant when Richie walked in on him changing at the end of the show.

“What are you doing?!?” Eddie was half in and half out of his fairy tights, and he turned away immediately, flushing crimson and moving to cover himself with his hands. “I said occupied, genius!”

“Oh.” Richie clearly wasn’t listening to him. He also wasn’t leaving...in fact, he was looking.

He was _looking._

And, because he was Richie...he was also talking.

“Spaghetti, I was just wondering...you said you hadn’t seen _She’s The Man_ , and as I told you, my room setup is fucking incredible, so--”

“Get out!” Eddie shrieked, throwing his metal crown headpiece at him. Richie, miraculously, took that hint, and departed, laughing all the way down the hallway.

Eddie tugged his fairy tights down to his ankles and slumped to the ground, defeated.  
Bill was right.  
He had a crush.

His immediate first response to that fact was to do his damndest to ignore it. He figured it would be easy - now that the issue was identified, it could be easily addressed. 

It was not easy. Nothing about Richie was easy - not listening to him, not bearing witness to some of his more unbearable habits, and apparently, not getting over him, either.

“Coming out, Eddie Spaghetti?” Richie whispered on closing night, as they watched sweet Mike Hanlon deliver the closing monologue. He held out his hand, and Eddie’s throat tightened at his (probably unintentional) double entendre.

Eddie smiled, knowing Richie couldn’t see him in the dark, and slipped his small hand into Richie’s big, clumsy one. “I’m with you, Rich.”

\----

Things came to a head at the cast party.

Bev’s boyfriend Ben was a little bit older than the rest of them, and so had an apartment a little ways off campus. Naturally, that meant that the whole cast was clamouring to have the party at his house, and Ben being the big softie that he was, he couldn’t help but acquiesce. 

That led to the Shakespeare kids parading noisily down into town after their final performance, singing together and sharing cigarettes (not Eddie, who was still sort of recovering from a phantom childhood asthma, but Richie and Bev and sometimes coiffed hair Stan and even Mike and Ben once or twice) until they got to Ben’s place.

“Are you guys always so loud?” Bill asked. Eddie had dragged him along to get him out of the house; he hadn’t really left it since Audra had broken up with him some two months prior. So far, that was turning out to be an okay decision...although less for Eddie than for Stan and Mike, apparently, given the looks they kept shooting Bill and each other.

“We’re theatre kids, Big Bill.” Richie had already given Bill a nickname, which meant that he liked him, and that didn’t make Eddie’s heart do somersaults at all. “We’re loud by nature.”

“We’re loud by necessity,” Bev chimed in cheerily.

Stan looked over, obviously irritated. “You’re loud because of your sound guys, and don’t you ever forget it.”

“Cheers,” Richie and Bev said in unison, holding up imaginary glasses.

“Cheers indeed,” Ben agreed, “we’re here.”

They clambered noisily up the stairs, and the party began. Almost immediately, the lights were dimmed, alcohol of all sorts was being passed from hand to hand, and people were dancing that awkward ‘not-yet-drunk dance’ to whoever’s pop music Spotify playlist was ringing out over the speakers.

Eddie remembered the last time he’d been at a party with Richie, and almost couldn’t help himself from laughing.

“What’s so funny, Eds?” Richie slid in next to him, obviously attempting to be suave. Eddie wasn’t sure if that was ever going to be a word Richie would fit in any real way - there was an inherent awkwardness to him, even through all of his projected charm and panache. Eddie thought it added to his attractiveness.

“Your face,” Eddie responded automatically, blushing red and taking a long sip of the shitty beer that Bev had slid him.

Richie examined Eddie’s drink with exaggerated horror. “Oh, sweetheart, where’d you get this? How could Hanscom serve this shit in his own home? Ben, you got a blender?”

“What the fuck are you on about?” Ben called, barely audible over the music. “It’s in the bottom left cabinet. Don’t kill yourself.”

Richie grinned wolfishly. “You ever had a margarita, Eds?”

“That’s not my name,” Eddie said, because it was the only response that his mind was giving him.

“I’ll make you one,” Richie promised, ignoring his name protest. “Wait here.”

Eddie finished his beer, watched Bill get dragged in to dance by Mike, and waited...and sure enough, Richie came back with a green, suspect looking drink clutched in his fist. He offered it out to Eddie, smiling a huge smile.

“Mazel Tov,” he proclaimed, watching Eddie as Eddie carefully handled the drink.

“Fuck off,” Stan called from across the room. Richie chuckled.

“Jewish sixth sense, that one. You gonna drink?”

Eddie nodded, steeled himself, and took down most of it in one swallow.

Richie’s expression was shocked, impressed, and a little bit of something else that Eddie couldn’t place. “What the hell?”

“Pills practice,” Eddie explained cryptically. “Easy.”

“Easy? All right then.” Richie grabbed the rest of the drink from Eddie’s hand and downed it. He had a decidedly more difficult time doing that than Eddie had; he spluttered immediately and had to put a hand over his mouth to force it down. “NOT easy, you little fucker. Also, this is trash. I made you a garbage drink. I hate this.”

“I liked it,” Eddie said softly, hoping he’d be drowned out by the music. He had no such luck - at just that moment, a softer song started playing.

Upon hearing the opening guitar, Richie’s face lit up. “Oh, this must be Bev’s playlist. She knows what I like.”

_“You belong among the wildflowers; you belong in a boat out at sea…”_

“What do you like?” Eddie asked, feeling bold.

Richie huffed out a small breath and looked down at him, expression totally transparent, as if to say, ‘you already know the answer to this question’.

He was right about that. Eddie did know.

“What do _you_ like, Eddie?” Richie countered instead of answering outright, baiting Eddie with the use of his full name. Eddie felt his throat close up, like it used to during the “asthma” attacks of his youth.

“I don’t know,” Eddie lied, looking at Richie’s (nasty scuffed) shoes.

Richie reached out and pulled Eddie’s chin up with two fingers.

“I think you like me,” Richie whispered, not unkindly. “I’ve seen you looking at me. I think you think I’m pretty.”

Eddie could only stare back at him, completely overwhelmed. Richie looked at him for a minute, then chuckled and leaned in.

“Cute,” Richie breathed, and then they were kissing - kissing in a way Eddie never had before, in a slick, rough, teeth clacking way that made his knees go weak for absolutely no reason.

They were kissing until, abruptly, they weren’t.

“Richie!” Bev called from upstairs, and Richie withdrew with a jolt, like he was waking up from a dream.

“Um,” he said, all former eloquence lost.

Eddie’s head was still spinning, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to process with Richie still standing there. “Go.”

“Oh.” Richie moved slowly, turning around towards the stairs. “I’ll see you --?”

Eddie didn’t respond, and as soon as Richie disappeared, he mumbled some hasty apologies and made a mad dash for his own dorm.

\----

Eddie didn’t know what to do about seeing Richie again.

Whatever had happened was real, Eddie was sure of it. He hadn’t been that drunk, and his heart and memory were insisting that the kiss had indeed transpired - that he wasn’t dreaming, wasn’t insane. He, Eddie Kaspbrak, had kissed Richie Tozier at the Midsummer cast party. Or, rather: Richie Tozier had kissed Eddie Kaspbrak at the Midsummer cast party, and Eddie Kaspbrak had kissed back.

There was a lot to think about within all of that.

First of all, it confirmed the fact that Eddie was at least a little gay. This was somehow the least troublesome part; it was really just validation of something that Eddie had suspected of himself the whole time.

The second and more prominent thing on his mind was Richie Tozier.

Richie wasn’t exactly Prince Charming material. He was annoying, he smoked like a chimney, and most importantly, he had a reputation. He fought in basement fight clubs and fucked around with all kinds of infamous campus women (and men, too, apparently). In short, rowdy boys like Richie were not meant for careful boys like Eddie.

And yet, as Eddie headed to their closing Acting Shakespeare class, he couldn’t help but hope.

He kept his head down as he pulled a chair over to his usual spot in the blackbox, not knowing who had seen what at the party. Fortunately, everyone seemed pretty wrapped up in their own stuff. Ben and Bev were huddled together, clutching coffee in a way that clearly indicated that they had drank themselves through not only the cast party, but the whole weekend. Mike was trying really earnestly to catch Stan’s eye. Stan, for his part, was wearing a giant scarf and pointedly ignoring Mike’s attention in a way that suggested that he was quietly mortified.

(Eddie couldn’t remember if Bill had made it home on Saturday night. He was going to have to ask him about what went down when he got back to the room.)

Richie rolled in thirty whole minutes late, and the minute he opened the door, Eddie felt like his whole body was on fire.

He was so beautiful - even now, at ten in the morning, with unbrushed hair and pajama pants tucked into Ugg boots, he was beautiful. Eddie watched him for a moment, quietly wondering how it took him so long to notice how interesting and exciting Richie was to look at.

Then, Richie looked over, and Eddie abruptly remembered that they’d kissed in front of everyone at the cast party.

He looked away, and Richie sat somewhere else.

The next hour of the class seemed to last a hundred years. They were having a reflective discussion about their performances and the audience’s reception of their work, but no one was really contributing in a productive way. Between Bev and Ben’s hangovers and everyone else’s sexual tension, no one could really concentrate. Still, the professor persisted, so they slogged through sixty minutes of painstakingly awkward conversation.

When it was over, the whole class let out a collective sigh of relief. Eddie scrambled to his feet, grabbing his bag and making to bolt his way back to Bill and whatever gossip Bill was willing to share.

Richie was faster than him. He grabbed Eddie’s arm as Eddie was swinging his tote over his shoulder.

“Hey, uh, Eds.” Richie looked nervous. Eddie held his breath.

“Hey, Rich.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Uh.” Richie searched Eddie’s face with worried eyes. Eddie wasn’t quite sure what he was looking to find, but he tried to make himself look open; warm. “Listen.”

“I didn’t--” Eddie began, but Richie wasn’t finished.

“Do you wanna come over and watch _She’s The Man?_ ” Richie asked, in a voice that was just a little bit too loud. “I tried to ask the other day, but…”

“Yes,” Eddie replied embarrassingly fast. “When?”

“Tonight?” Richie suggested weakly.

Eddie’s heart lurched.

“Tonight,” he agreed, willing himself not to turn red. “Where do you live?”

Richie blinked twice in surprise. “Oh, I never told you? I’m in Cutler. Just knock and someone’ll let you in - I’ll be waiting for you in the lounge. Let’s say...eight?”

“Eight,” Eddie echoed shakily. “I’ll be there.”

“You better!” Richie smiled, and turned to leave. “Or I’ll have to default to spending time with your mom again.”

“Get fucked,” Eddie called after him with his heart in his throat.

Eight o’clock.

T-minus nine hours until Richie.

\----

At t-minus thirty minutes until Richie, Eddie, on Bill’s advice, went out for a smoke.

Eddie had, of course, never really inhaled anything but the air and what came out of his...well, inhaler, but Bill had recommended a kind of quasi-cigar to him that he thought would calm him down, and Eddie figured he didn’t really have anything to lose.

He slid the Black & Mild out of his pocket, fumbled nervously with the mouthpiece, and then lit it with the cheap Bic lighter he’d picked up earlier at CVS. Closing his eyes, he brought it to his mouth, and inhaled…

...and did not choke, to his immediate surprise. In fact, the sensation was almost...pleasant.

If Sonia Kaspbrak could see him now, she’d have a heart attack and die on the spot. No asthma, a cigar in his mouth, and headed to rendezvous with a boy? That couldn’t be her Eddie-Bear, no way, no how.

Surprisingly, Bill had been right - Eddie was feeling a little more relaxed after a few lungfuls of smoke. He’d have to remember to thank Bill later (or at least not blackmail Bill over the giant bite mark on his collarbone and the fact that he had Stan’s jacket up in his room).

He began to drift in the direction of the Cutler dorm building. His mind was still racing, but not in a bad way: he wasn’t terrified anymore, but he was still curious as to what the hell Richie was up to. Was this a date, or was it just friends watching a movie? Did the kiss mean anything at all to Richie?

Did _Eddie_ mean anything at all to Richie?

Eddie arrived at the Cutler steps at 7:50, and for once, he was a little upset about being early. Richie wouldn’t be expecting him for another ten minutes at least,and he really had no idea what he was going to do. Stewing outside in his feelings sounded like a terrible option, but it was all that his shit brain was coming up with.

Fortunately (and somewhat shockingly), Richie had forseen this being an issue. He opened the door at the exact moment that Eddie was considering walking out and away.

“Eddie Spaghetti, right on time,” Richie beamed, ushering him in with a wave of his hand.

“Right on time,” Eddie parroted, following Richie inside with his heart in his throat.

“I’m sorry in advance, by the way,” Richie said, seemingly talking for the sake of noise as they climbed the stairs to his room, “but Ben jacked my couch for the cast party and he hasn’t moved it back over yet, so we’re gonna have to sit on the bed. I know that you’re probably used to a higher standard of living, but--”

“The bed’s okay,” Eddie squeaked, working to push specific daydreams of Richie in bed out of the forefront of his mind.

“Cool.” Richie looked about as settled as Eddie felt. His face was a little sweaty, and he kept fidgeting with pieces of his hair. “Cool, cool, okay.”

They reached the door to Richie’s room, and Richie paused, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“I share this room with Stan, by the way,” he said, tapping his foot, “and you’ll definitely be able to tell what side is his. He said he wasn’t coming home tonight, though.”

Oh. So they were going to be completely alone.

Well, fuck.

“I hope he’s not planning on staying at mine,” Eddie said vaguely. “I know he and Mike had some kind of thing with my roommate Bill at the party.”

“That’s fucking hilarious,” Richie said, smiling for the first time since he opened the door, “and if that’s what’s up, then don’t worry your pretty head. Mike’s got a single; they’ll go to his.”

“Yikes.” Eddie cringed, both at the mental image of Bill hooking up with both Stan and Mike and the ‘pretty head’ comment.

“Yikes indeed.” Richie finally pushed open the door. “Proceed, my liege.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie muttered as he passed by Richie to enter the room. Immediately, he felt fondness welling up in his chest; Richie’s side of the room was full of character and untidy by the very nature of the person living in it, but it was obvious that Richie had done his very best to clean before Eddie got there - the bed was made and most of his laundry had been thrown haphazardly into a hamper.

“It’s not much,” Richie said behind him, “but I like it.”

“Me too,” Eddie assured him, biting back a smile as he examined a giant poster of David Bowie.

“Good.” Richie took two long strides into the room and jumped onto the bed, retrieving his laptop from the nightstand where he’d left it and opening it up. “Come sit, sweetheart.”

“No end to the pet names, huh?” Eddie asked, crossing to the bed and sitting gingerly on it, feet still on the ground.

“Nope!” Richie popped the ‘p’, and pushed the laptop down to the end of the bed. “All right. Makeshift TV, set up. You’re welcome. Come make yourself comfortable.” To punctuate his point, Richie scooted all the way over to the far side of the bed.

“You’re a genius.” Eddie rolled his eyes and swung his feet up on to the bed, feeling a little awkward about still having his shoes on but not knowing how to ask to take them off.

He never got around to taking them off. Richie started the movie almost immediately, and they immersed themselves in it, remaining on opposite sides of the bed.

Eddie didn’t let himself think too hard about what that meant.

The movie was good. Amanda Bynes was funny, Channing Tatum was attractive as ever, and Eddie would have been totally wrapped up in it if he weren’t watching Richie inch closer and closer to him out of the corner of his eye. Richie covered his movements with jokes and excuses, but by the time Amanda Bynes was being hit on by the other blonde girl, Richie was pressed up against his side: arm to arm, thigh to thigh.

Eddie didn’t let himself think too hard about what that meant, either. He just leaned into the contact - allowed his body to relax against Richie’s, and basked in the moment.

Richie felt the weight of Eddie against his shoulder and responded, deftly and immediately, by pulling his arm out from next to Eddie and wrapping it around Eddie’s shoulder, pulling him in tight.

Eddie felt himself curling into Richie the rest of the way; felt himself tilt his head up, and wondered: who is this brave person and what have they done with Eddie Kaspbrak?

It didn’t matter where the bravery came from, though, because it was there, and Richie was looking down at him and taking off his stupid hipster glasses, and then they were kissing, kissing, kissing, and all of Eddie’s stress and nerves were replaced by the thrum of his heart echoing through his body.

Richie kissed like he spoke: erratically and enthusiastically, and Eddie felt himself struggling to keep up after a while. He pulled back, gasping for air.

“Okay?” Richie asked immediately. “Eds?”

“What are we doing, Richie?” Eddie asked, squeezing his eyes shut.

He felt gentle pressure on his hands, and opened his eyes to see that Richie had taken them and was holding them delicately.

“Whatever you want,” Richie whispered, running his thumbs over Eddie’s knuckles. “Okay?”

Eddie nodded, still not looking up, and brought Richie’s hands - his giant, coarse hands - to his lips.

“Okay,” he whispered back against them, and he could almost feel Richie smile in response.

 

\----

“You were out late.” Bill’s ambush the next day at breakfast wasn’t technically an interrogation, but it felt a little bit like one.

“I was with Richie,” Eddie explained, carefully cutting up his banana and arranging the slices in his oatmeal. “We were watching a movie.”

“Yeah, that’s what you told me,” Bill said, clutching his coffee mug, “but what actually happened?”

“We watched two movies.” Eddie added berries to his oatmeal and took a moment to admire his creation. “ _She’s The Man_ and _Mulan_.”

“If he hurts you, I’ll kill him.” Bill, as always, saw right through Eddie’s bullshit. “Also, are you going to Midnight Madness tonight? I told Stan and Mike I’d meet up with them there, and I think Bev’s signed up to do the dunking booth through the civil liberties club she’s a part of.”

“You’re a regular old Shakespeare classmate now, aren’t you?” Eddie marveled. “I wasn’t gonna go, but I can check it out if you’re still nervous to be around Stan and Mike when you’re sober.”

“I’m not,” Bill lied, “and it doesn’t matter; I was gonna get blitzed before going anyway.”

“Oh, then definitely,” Eddie agreed, pushing around his oatmeal masterpiece to get the perfect ratio of oatmeal, berry, and banana on his spoon.

\----

 

He found himself cursing that decision when midnight actually rolled around. It was December, and it was cold, and Eddie had rolled himself up in blankets long ago.

“Suck it up,” Bill said sweetly when Eddie complained, “and take another shot.”

Eddie did. Admittedly, the Fireball was helpful.

“I still hate you,” Eddie told him as he put on his coat and Bean boots.

“Don’t care,” Bill said, opening the door and sweeping out into the night, with Eddie hot on his heels.

Eddie had never been to Midnight Madness, and when he walked in, he knew that he wouldn’t be back if he could help it. It was a giant, messy indoor carnival of an event that was intended to give students a little bit of stress relief before final exams rolled around. Most of the people around them seemed to be having a good time, but Eddie was more comfortable when things were more...in control. (That being the case, his attraction to Richie was really inexplicable, but again, Eddie was trying not to think too much about what exactly was going on there.)

Stan and Mike found them almost immediately, and dragged them off to the dunk tank, where Bev was perched precariously on the little board.

“No,” she yelled as soon as she saw them coming, “no, no fucking way, Uris, don’t you dare.”

Stan smiled calculatingly. He was the least drunk of them, and also the most precise, so Bev was right to fear him. “Sorry, Bev.”

“Mike, don’t give him three dollars!” Bev cried, but Mike had already handed over the money. He shrugged back at her helplessly as Stan picked up a baseball.

“Sorry, Bev.”

“Any last words?” Stan asked, tossing the ball up in the air and catching it again.

“Fuck you,” Bev said, obviously bracing herself.

“Good choice.” Stan threw the ball like a professional - fast and accurate - and Bev went plunging into the water, screaming expletives the whole way down.

“Looks like I’m just in time!” Richie appeared seemingly out of nowhere, slinging his arms around Stan and Bill. “Looking good, Bevvy baby!”

“Go fuck your mom,” Bev spluttered, climbing out of the tank and veering towards a stack of provided towels.

“No, you,” Richie slurred, grinning. He looked over at Eddie, and his eyes lit up. “Spaghetti, sweetheart! Didn’t see you there.”

“You’re drunk,” Eddie accused, but he was smiling back.

“So’re you, I think,” Richie laughed, detaching himself from Stan and Bill (who both sighed with immediate relief) and stumbling over to Eddie. “C’mon, I’ve got somethin’ to show you.”

Against his better instincts, Eddie left Bill and Stan to their own devices and followed Richie over to...a row of trash cans.

“You wanted to introduce me to your family,” Eddie guessed, giggling softly to himself. Richie’s jaw dropped open.

“You sassy little shit,” he mumbled, looking at Eddie with an amount of fondness, “adorable little motherfucking--c’mere. C’mere.”

“Richie,” Eddie started to protest, but Richie cut him off by dragging him forward into a sloppy, sweet kiss. His glasses were pressing into Eddie’s face in a really uncomfortable way, but Eddie didn’t care at all, not one bit. (That was probably the most obvious indicator that Eddie was drunk, but he elected to ignore that in favor of how good he was feeling.)

“Come back to mine,” Richie whispered against his mouth when they finally broke apart, panting. “Tell Bill he can bring Stan back to your room, and stay with me.”

“I think that blonde girl over there is staring at us,” Eddie whispered back, trying to undercut the nervousness he felt about potentially spending the night with Richie.

Richie looked up briefly, and then snorted. “‘Course she is. We used to date.”

“Her?” Eddie tried to look back, but Richie captured his lips in another kiss before he could.

“Yeah. Only other human on this campus I’ve fucked around with,” Richie said deliberately, pulling off of Eddie’s mouth wetly. “Bad choice, that time. This choice is way better.”

“I thought…” Eddie started to say, but Richie was kissing him again and again and again and ultimately rendering him unable to finish his sentence.

“I know,” Richie said, finally pausing his barrage of kisses to address Eddie’s line of thinking. “I know what fuckin’...I don’t even know who says the shit that gets said about me, but it’s not true, okay? None of it.”

Eddie felt his heart soar, and chose to have faith.

“Okay,” he said, and followed Richie through the cold all the way back to his dorm.

\----

Eddie didn’t really have anything to be worried about. Richie was no gentleman, but he also wasn't the kind of person to push limits, which meant that sleeping over meant (for the time being) just that - sleeping.

Unfortunately, Eddie had never shared a bed before, and sleep was proving...elusive.

“Stop fidgeting,” Richie mumbled, voice thick with exhaustion and alcohol as he tried his best to wrap his gargantuan body around Eddie in a way that would help them fit better in the tiny college dorm bed.

“Why’d you choose me, Rich?” Eddie said in response, words muffled in Richie’s chest.

Richie shifted. “What do you mean?”

“You could have had anyone on this campus,” Eddie continued, running his hand along Richie’s arm. “People think you’re great.”

“I want you,” Richie insisted, burying his face in Eddie’s hair and clutching Eddie even further into his torso. “I watched you in Shakespeare last semester and I just...you were so charming; so serious.” A laugh vibrated around in Richie’s chest, and Eddie felt his whole body shake with it. “So smart, too.”

“Oh.” Eddie thought about that. “Oh. But what about--”

“No more questions, Spaghetti Man.” Richie pressed a kiss to his hair. “Sleep now.”

“Okay,” Eddie said, and tried to relax.

It took Eddie another thirty minutes to drift off, but it was worth it to listen to Richie’s breathing for a while. 

\----

Of course, nothing good in Eddie’s life was ever permanent.

“I’m studying abroad next semester, you know,” Richie told him the next day, after they had brushed their teeth so that they could kiss some more. They’d gone straight back to bed after that, and had so far spent the morning tangled up in each other and talking about Richie’s inexplicable appreciation of Miley Cyrus.

Eddie felt the shock of Richie’s words in his body like he’d been tased. “Where?”

“I’m going to Israel with Stan.” Richie sounded neutral about the whole thing, and Eddie couldn’t help but feel a little angry about that. Didn’t he care that they weren’t going to see each other for more than half a year?

“For what?” Eddie asked, unable to keep an amount of bitterness out of his voice.

“Experience, I guess.” Richie’s tone didn’t change. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

Eddie slid backwards, reeling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because then you wouldn’t be here, would you?” Richie asked knowingly, sliding his hands down to Eddie’s wrists and tugging him back in.

He was right. If Eddie had known that Richie was going away, Eddie would have done just about anything to keep himself away from Richie. He was pretty dedicated to protecting his own heart.

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me?” he whispered again, reaching his hands up to cup Richie’s face.

“I’ll be back,” Richie said in a low voice, turning his head and kissing one of Eddie’s wrists. “And we have this week. Come to the party Stan and I are throwing on Saturday, okay? It’s our goodbye party, and I want you there.”

“Your friends don’t like me,” Eddie reminded him.

“My friends like you better than they like me,” Richie corrected. “Please come.”

“I’ll be there on Saturday night.” Eddie trailed his hands down, watching Richie shudder under his fingers and trying to memorize how it felt, looked, sounded. “I promise.”

“And I’ll come to you every night in between,” Richie said lazily, smiling over at Eddie like they had all the time in the world.

\----

They barely had any time at all. It was Saturday before Eddie knew it. 

“Stan, where’s Richie?” was the first question Eddie asked after Stan opened the door to let him into their get-together. There was soft music coming from inside the room, and a string of fairy lights was wound around the walls to make up for the fact that they had already packed their posters.

“Nice to see you, too, Eddie.” Stan rolled his eyes. “Richie’s all the way inside, sitting on his stupid couch that he’s probably going to have to put in storage for the next six months.”

“It’s a good couch,” Eddie shrugged, having finally gotten to witness it in person last Thursday.

“Don’t encourage him.” Stan stepped back to let Eddie into the room. “Go to him, though. He’s sad.”

Eddie walked in to find Richie drinking Malibu rum straight from the bottle. He was, in fact, on the terrible denim upholstered couch. When he saw Eddie, he dropped the rum and immediately made grabby hands.

“Baby, baby, baby, you _came_.” Richie looked amazed to see him. “Was worried you wouldn’t.”

“Anything for you,” Eddie said, understanding the weight of that sentence and not caring at all about the implications.

“Sit, down, sweetheart.” Eddie was now close enough to Richie that Richie could reach him, and he capitalized on that by grabbing the hem of Eddie’s pink hoodie and yanking so that Eddie crashed down into his lap. Eddie sat up almost immediately, embarrassed, and then quickly arranged himself in Richie’s arms.

“I’m staying over,” he told Richie quietly.

“I know,” Richie responded, amused.

The rest of the night mostly consisted of Richie introducing people to Eddie. Most of the people at the party were theatre majors or people that Richie knew from the dorms, so they were new to Eddie - but they all seemed to know who he was.

That was another thing that Eddie was going to have to not think too hard about.

Finally, the throng of people that had arrived to bid Richie and Stan goodbye thinned out, until only Richie and Eddie remained, leaned against each other on Richie’s bed. A song was playing in the background - the same song that was playing when they kissed at the party. It made Eddie feel a little bit electric.

_Sail away, kill off the hours. You belong somewhere you feel free._

“What the fuck happened to Stan?” Eddie asked, looking over at Stan’s black bedspread.

“He’s sad to be leaving, I think,” Richie replied, rubbing a hand up and down Eddie’s leg idly. “Sad that Mike’s going to be going somewhere else, sad that Bill’s gonna be here.”

“Hm.” Eddie was a little buzzed, and his body was responding to Richie’s touch in a really extraordinary way. “Me, too.”

“You’re sad about Mike and Bill?” Richie asked teasingly.

“You know what I mean,” Eddie sighed, reaching over and tugging at the front of Richie’s shirt. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“Kiss you?” Richie deflected the sentiment and leaned in to attach his mouth to Eddie’s, hands immediately finding their way under Eddie’s long sleeved gray shirt. “With pleasure.”

Eddie would have told him off, except that his brain seemed to have short circuited. Richie was bunching up the fabric of his shirt and trying to push it up off over his shoulders, and Eddie felt cold and hot all over as he helped Richie remove the shirt all the way.

“Richie?” Eddie didn’t really know what he was asking for, but he knew that he wanted it.

“Eds,” Richie responded, low and warm. “Push me off if you don’t like anything.”

“What do you me--” Eddie started, but choked on the end of the sentence as Richie worked his beautiful mouth swiftly down Eddie’s torso, starting with bites and kisses on Eddie’s neck (many of which, Eddie knew, would be purple marks the next day), and ending with his nose buried in the hair right under Eddie’s navel. Eddie was pretty sure all of the blood in his entire body was heading for his dick at the sight of Richie down there, and he tugged frantically at Richie’s curls, not wanting to embarrass himself.

“Okay?” Richie asked, inhaling sharply and blushing a deep red. The hair pulling seemed to have really affected him.

“Really good,” Eddie said shyly. “I didn’t mean--I’m sorry. It’s just...it’s making me….”

“Hard?” Richie asked, pulling Eddie to him so that their bodies were flush, and _holy shit, Richie was hard, too_. “That’s the point, sweetheart.”

“But aren’t we--?” Eddie tried to ask, knowing his words were all in the wrong order because he still couldn’t think straight, god damn it, but Richie was too fast, too fast, too fast. He reached down between them and pressed his hand against the front of Eddie’s jeans. Eddie jumped, surprised and painfully turned on.

“You haven’t done this before.” Richie’s comment was more of a statement than a question, and Eddie bristled at his assumption.

“Not true, jackass. Actually, I was fifteen when I hooked up with a guy for the first time. We--”

Richie rolled his eyes, having easily seen through Eddie’s little lie, and moved his other hand down so as to better be able to unbutton Eddie’s jeans. “It’s okay if you haven’t, Spaghetti. I’ve only done it with one other person, and never with a guy.”

Eddie was sure that his whole body was red, now - his face, his arms, his chest, his ears, all of it. “I’m sorry that I’m not….I’m not…”

“Shut up,” Richie told him, making quick work of Eddie’s button and pushing down Eddie’s jeans and boxer shorts to the middle of his thighs. He slid his hands back up the sides of Eddie’s legs, and then retracted his hands to make quick work of his own shirt and pants. “You are. You’re everything.” He paused, looking Eddie in the eyes. “Are you ready?”

“Touch me, Richie,” Eddie whimpered, and Richie’s eyes went dark.

He spit in his hand and shifted to grab both himself and Eddie in his newly slick palm. Eddie’s hips jerked forward of their own accord, and he knew: nothing on Earth had ever been this good before. In the whole history of time, this was the best and most important thing.

“Good?” Richie asked, shyly kissing the corner of Eddie’s mouth.

“Move,” Eddie responded shakily, bucking forward against Richie’s hand and dick to try to get some friction. “You’re trying to kill me before you go, aren’t you?”

Richie sighed quietly, beginning to stroke both of them together at a slow pace that made Eddie want to scream. 

“Only happy thoughts, now,” Richie said, and sped up. Eddie threw his head back and let Richie work over their cocks, marveling at the intimacy and sweetness that was inherent in the movement - even when it was clear that both of them were wound up and about ready to cum, Richie was thorough and careful in a way that made Eddie feel really special.

“Richie,” Eddie breathed, as his orgasm finally washed over him (and Richie’s hand, and a little bit on the sheets).

“Fuck,” Richie swore. Eddie’s orgasm seemed to have set him off. Eddie opened his eyes, coming down from his own high, and was awestruck by the look on Richie’s face as he neared the edge. Richie squeezed his eyes shut, stroked his dick firmly one more time, and then was following Eddie down, cumming all over Eddie’s stomach.

They lay there for a moment, painted in bodily fluids and dizzy with feelings.

“Okay?” Richie asked again after the silence turned tense. “Eds?”

“Don’t call me that.” Eddie pulled himself forward to coil around Richie. He was probably going to end up stuck to him, given that they hadn’t cleaned up, but to Eddie’s complete and utter shock, he was feeling pretty nonchalant about how dirty they were. “And yes. Okay.”

Richie didn’t respond, except to kiss the top of his head.

“Don’t wanna fall asleep,” Eddie said, face nestled in the hollow of Richie’s collarbone. “Don’t want you to go.”

“Stop talking about it,” Richie whispered, and Eddie felt something seize in his chest.

“Okay.”

They spent almost the rest of the night in a sad, sweet silence, cut only by the song that Richie had apparently put on repeat.

_You belong somewhere you feel free._

\----

When Eddie woke up, Richie was gone.

\----

Fortunately, they’d exchanged numbers, so it wasn’t like all contact immediately ceased after Richie drove with Stan to the airport on that nasty December morning. (The only reason Richie had left so early was to catch a flight; he was spending two weeks with his family in California before joining Stan abroad. Stan, much to his own dismay, was left to the unenviable task of putting the rest of Richie's stuff in storage.) When Richie was actually overseas, the situation would be more tricky (as in, Richie would probably need an international phone in order to communicate with Eddie, and that was a bit out of Wentworth Tozier’s price range), but they could talk for the next two weeks, at least.

The conversation wasn’t much, but it was sweet, and made Eddie smile.

**-hows ur break eddie my love-**  
**-mines garbage wents already on the warparth about me being on my phone all the time-**  
**-like srry cant help it daddyo-**  
**-got a cute boy to text here-**

Texts from Richie were pretty much all Eddie had to look forward to, most days. Being at home with his mother for Christmas was nothing short of excruciating. So far, he’d had to sit through three sessions of his aunts pinching his cheeks and gifting him sweaters he would never wear, twenty hours of daytime television, and twelve thousand, four hundred and three lectures on his hygiene and health. She was unimpressed with the way he’d been taking care of himself at college.

“You’ll never settle down with a nice girl if you continue to grow out your hair, Edward,” was her most common gripe.

Eddie didn’t know how to tell her that ‘nice girl’ was pretty much the farthest thing from his type, so he kept his mouth shut and let her talk.

**-so bev n ben are here to visit rite-**  
**-i took em to disneyland bc the folks have annual passes. fuck knows why-**  
**-prolly cuz they never bothered to figure out any of my adult interests lol-**  
**-anyway so we went on splash mtn and i swear to god eds-**  
**-the fuckin goose that sings the how do you do song sang the word ‘hi’ as we went by-**  
**-and Ben no joke says hi to it back like unironic af-**  
**-it was pure as fuck i wish youd seen it-**  
**-i wish you were here-**

“Something’s wrong with you, baby.” Sonia cornered him on the sixth day of his being home. “Why are you so attached to the phone lately, Edward?”

Eddie panicked quietly, racking his brain for a lie. “Uh. New app. Sudoku. Love those numbers.”

“You’ve always tended more towards English,” Sonia said, confused. “I didn’t think you liked number puzzles.”

“I don’t,” Eddie confirmed. “Except this one.”

She still looked suspicious. “If you’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Eddie looked back at her, defensive and scared. If she found out about what he was doing, the fight and aftermath would be nothing short of devastating.

“Okay,” she said warily, and Eddie made a mental note to be more careful about his phone activity.

**-was just thinkin bout the day i walked in on you during midsumms-**  
**-with your tights around your ankles and your undies all jostled-**  
**-i was tryin to ask you out like all suave you know but then there you were-**  
**-right outta my wet dreams-**  
**-was all i could do not to pin you to the wall-**  
**-im not usually good for more than jokes abt sex really but theres somethin bout you kaspbrak-**  
**-im in bed rn with my dick in my hand and all i can think abt is the way you scrunch your lil freckled nose-**  
**-its doing it for me faster than any other fantasy ive ever had-**

“ _Sudoku_ , Edward?!” 

Eddie came down the stairs on the ninth day of vacation to find his mother holding out his phone disgustedly.

Fuck.

He’d left it downstairs to charge last night, which he’d kind of known was a mistake, but he’d tried to remedy that the best he could by hiding it in the pantry, next to the bran flakes that Sonia bought for herself and never actually ate.

Apparently, she’d either been in the mood for bran flakes this morning, or had snooped around big time.

Eddie’s money was on the second option.

“Are you looking at my private messages, mama?” he asked, steeling himself.

“I’m not sure I should be trusting you to have private messages anymore, Eddie,” she hissed, obviously livid. “I’m not even sure I should be sending you back to school. Is that where you met this ‘Richie’?”

“Mom, I turned twenty-one years old in November. You can’t--”

“Are you forgetting,” she said slowly, “who is paying your tuition?”

He looked at her, saw that she couldn’t be reasoned with in this state, and knew that there was really only one decision he could make in light of all this.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I won’t talk to Richie anymore. He’s going abroad next semester, anyway.”

“Good,” Sonia spat, “maybe that’ll bring you back to your senses.”

“Can I have my phone now?” he asked, without hope.

“Not on your life,” Sonia said. “You’ll get it when you go back to school. For today, I’ve booked you a haircut appointment. It’s in forty-five minutes; I’ll drive you.”

Eddie’s stomach sank. Richie would be gone by the time he was back to school.

Still, he couldn’t talk back, not now. He had to get his degree so that he could get out for good. It was a matter of survival.

“Okay,” he choked out, and walked shakily back upstairs, trying not to cry.

**-eds i dunno why the sudden radio silence-**  
**-but im leaving tomorrow and i just want you to know-**  
**-like whatever happens or however youre feeling rn-**  
**-what we did mattered to me-**  
**-you matter to me-**  
**-i have fuckin feelings for you kaspbrak-**  
**-so dont forget about me-**  
**-please-**

As soon as Eddie was back on campus, the first thing he did was turn on his phone and read through Richie’s messages. There were four hundred and thirty. Some were jokes, some were confused questions about why he wasn’t responding, some were insecure wonderings about whether Eddie had gotten tired of him...but it was the last one that hurt the most.

**-I could never forget about you.-**

Eddie typed without hope, and sure enough, about a minute after he sent the message, a small red exclamation point showed up next to the text bubble.

A Miley Cyrus song started to play from the radio in the bathroom. Eddie could hear it all the way down the hall.

He figured that that was the universe’s way of telling him that it was all right to cry.

\----

Eddie spent that spring semester in something of an emotionless void.

He didn’t go out, and the only place he spent time besides his classes, the library, and his room was the gym. He realized pretty early on that exercise made it so that he was too tired to feel his emotions at full volume, so he tried to get there as much as possible in order to numb the hurt and loneliness that had taken up residence in his gut.

It was a good strategy, and it worked most of the time, but some things were just too big for Eddie to ignore outright. The worst days were when Richie would post photos to Facebook.

Richie had, according to Facebook, taken the opposite approach to making himself feel better. He was throwing himself into new situations, going out all the time, and taking pictures with what seemed like the entire population of Tel Aviv. Every single time Eddie saw Richie with his arm over a girl’s shoulder, or laughing with some guy, he felt sick and angry. 

“He’s hurting,” Bill tried to explain one night after he caught Eddie staring at a photo album. “He’s trying to deal with that the best way he knows how.”

“It’s not healthy,” Eddie murmured, tracing the line of Richie’s smile on the screen.

“What you’re doing isn’t healthy either, Eddie,” Bill said, exasperated. “Stan and I are trying our best to help both of you get off of your asses and deal with this, but neither of you will--”

“How have you been talking to Stan?” Eddie asked, whipping his head around to look Bill in the eyes.

“Facebook Messenger,” Bill said, “but that’s not the point, and--”

“Richie hasn’t messaged me,” Eddie said numbly.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Bill turned to leave the room, obviously fed up with Eddie’s idiocy. “So then message _him_ , Eddie. Christ.”

Eddie closed his laptop and curled in on himself angrily, thinking of all the times Richie had posted pictures and wondering why he hadn’t thought to reach out.

He went to sleep without messaging Richie, and the next day, he spent two hours on the treadmill - a personal record.

\----

Richie was set to return from Israel on June 20th. He was flying straight back to California (according to social media; Eddie himself hadn’t heard from Richie in months), so there was no real chance that Eddie would interact with him until September.

Eddie found himself almost...relieved.

Sonia, for her part, was thrilled with their lack of contact, and was more than willing to let Eddie return to school in the fall. This was really the only silver lining to the cloud that was to be Eddie’s summer, as she had officially, over the course of the last year, grown too large to be able to really take care of herself. This meant that when Eddie wasn’t working the retail job that he loathed with every fiber of his being, he was spending every single second catering to Sonia’s disgusting whims. It was degrading and dehumanizing, and he longed for the sanctity of his dorm room.

The only thing he could really control about his life was his food intake, as he was doing the grocery shopping and cooking for the household, and so he made eating the central concern of his summer. He’d gained a little weight over the course of his three years of college, which was normal, but Eddie knew that if he lost just ten pounds he’d return to school with new confidence. He started charting out his calories, being careful not to exceed 2,000...and then 1,800, and then 1,500…

By the end of the summer, Eddie had lost twenty-five pounds and was on track to keep losing. He kept a fastidious food diary through an app on his phone, and exercised for at least an hour every day.

His mother, for her part, was still more concerned about how long his hair was getting than any other part of his physical appearance.

As a last fuck you to her, he didn’t cut it before he left for school again.

\----

For his senior year, Eddie was renting a room off campus, so it took him a couple of days to run into any of his friends.

When he did, they were less thrilled to see him than he’d imagined they’d be.

“Eddie.” Bill stopped him in the dining hall. Eddie wasn’t there to eat, he was just filling his water bottle, but he had time, so he capped the bottle and turned more fully towards Bill.

“Bill! How was your summer?”

Bill winced. “It was fine...is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, clutching his water bottle to his chest and ignoring that his vision was a little soft around the edges. “Why?”

Bill obviously didn’t know how to phrase the thing he was going to say. He scanned Eddie’s face uncomfortably. “You’re, uh, wearing three sweatshirts, and it’s like, seventy degrees outside.”

Eddie forced a smile. “When you’re cold, you’re cold, am I right?”

Bill started to reply, but Eddie decided he didn’t really want to hear it, and started to leave before any noise could leave Bill’s mouth.

“See you later!”

He got similar treatment later in the week from Stan and Mike, who he ran into in the library, and Ben (who was now working for an architecture firm in the area) and Bev, who he saw on his way to his education seminar. He didn’t understand it, really. Shouldn’t they be happy for him? He looked great, and he’d survived his summer. Now, all he had to do was get through his student teaching, get a job, and get the fuck on with his life.

Right?

The wrench in that plan, as always, was Richie.

Eddie didn’t see him until last.

It was Friday when it happened. Eddie was on his way back to his room, tripping over his own feet and cursing his own lack of dexterity, when he heard a familiar laugh ring out through the quad.

Richie was stretched out on the lawn, laughing with a big group of people that Eddie didn’t know. His curls were out of their usual ponytail, and he looked absolutely free.

A song started playing in Eddie’s mind, unbidden.

_And I have seen, I’ve seen no other….no one who compares with you._

Eddie sped up his walk.

Unfortunately, that meant that he was more conspicuous. Richie’s head snapped over, his eyes widened, and he pushed himself to his feet.

Eddie squeezed his eyes shut and kept walking, but Richie’s legs were longer than his. He felt Richie’s hand on his shoulder after about fifteen seconds.

“Avoiding me, Kaspbrak?” Richie asked guardedly. “After I came back with a gorgeous tan from Israel and everything?”

“You couldn’t tan if you tried.” Eddie couldn’t help but let a small smile creep on to his face. He turned to face Richie...and watched the smile on Richie’s face slowly fade.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Richie whispered, reaching for Eddie’s face. Eddie closed his eyes and let him trace his thumb along his cheekbone. “What did you do?”

“This probably isn’t a good idea right now,” Eddie responded, opening his eyes and feeling his stomach clench at the blatant concern on Richie’s face. “Whatever it is that we were doing before, I mean.”

“No,” Richie agreed, and that made Eddie’s stomach clench again, but for a different reason. “We’ll talk about that later. For now, I want you to be well.”

“I am well,” Eddie said, surprised.

Richie shook his head sadly. “The fact that I could cut myself on your collarbones suggests otherwise, Spaghetti.”

“Oh.” Eddie had thought he looked better this way...but Richie had been attracted to him before, hadn’t he? With all his softness and imperfections?

“Call me if you need anything,” Richie said softly, and disappeared back among his friends.

Eddie went back to his room and thought...about what Richie had said, about the pitying looks he’d gotten from the rest of his friends, about the fact that he was afraid to eat more than a salad at dinner in case it made him put any weight back on.

He made an appointment with campus counseling for the next week.

\----

Getting better wasn’t a quick process for Eddie. In fact, he wasn’t sure if it was a process that was ever going to end for him - Sonia had done quite a number on his psyche over the years, and having control over food was the only thing that had ever made him feel like he’d escaped her at any level, so it was going to take a lot to get him to let go.

For now, he was on a new eating plan. It was more than 2,000 calories per day, and it freaked Eddie out so much that he barely had time to think about anything else. He was trying to channel his remaining energy into working on his schoolwork, which meant that his social life was really taking a hit.

Bill was the one that figured out how to remedy that. For accountability’s sake, the campus nutritionist (who had been recommended to Eddie by the counselor) suggested that Eddie eat with other people who would make sure that he finished his food, and for a while, that was just Bill.

Then, Bill brought Stan and Mike. Eddie was okay with that. They were good guys, and ultimately sympathetic on the days when Eddie broke down crying over the fact that his breakfast came with bacon that he was going to be forced to eat.

Stan and Mike invited Ben and Bev a week later. Why they were still letting Ben into the dining halls at this point, Eddie had no idea, but he wasn’t complaining, because Ben was particularly understanding. In fact, he was a large part of the reason why Eddie was okay with them staying - there was something in his eyes that made Eddie think that he’d been through something similar, once upon a time.

Finally, the five of them seemed to reach a consensus that it would be okay to invite Richie.

Richie came, of course. In fact, after the first time, Richie was there every day, sitting right next to him and squeezing his hand when he started to shake.

Eddie wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had enough going on without having to constantly re-evaluate how his relationship with Richie was going, especially with student teaching on the horizon. Plus, he was too close to the finish line to screw things up with his mother.

All of that being the case, he didn’t think his friends would be too surprised when he announced that Myra, the intern at the campus wellness center, had asked him on a date, and that he had accepted.

They were pretty fucking surprised.

Stan was the first to voice it. “Hey, Eddie, no offense, but aren’t you gay?”

Eddie shrugged. “I mean, obviously kinda, but...I don’t know one hundred percent.”

“Who is she?” Bill asked, suspicious. “Why haven’t we heard about her?”

“I see her sometimes,” Eddie said, annoyed at Bill’s tone, “I don’t tell you guys about every single person I talk to, you know.”

Richie, for his part, looked like he had several things he wanted to say. Eddie almost couldn’t look at him because the hurt on his face was so transparent. When he opened his mouth, Eddie winced and readied himself…

“Is she hot?” Richie asked flatly.

Eddie blinked back at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Richie got up, clearing his food. “Have a nice time, Eds.”

The rest of the table turned to glare at Eddie once Richie was well enough out of the way.

“Are you stupid?” Bev asked bluntly.

“Bev, that’s not nice.” Mike shook his head. “Just...be careful, Eddie. WIth yourself, and with Richie. Okay?”

“I will,” Eddie promised.

\----

He was more careful with Richie than he was with himself.

Somehow, one date with Myra turned into four, five, six dates with Myra. Eddie wasn’t attracted to her at all (this was really just serving to confirm the fact that he was totally and truly gay), but she was nice, and Eddie wasn’t really sure how to break up with someone amicably. He’d never done it before.

When Christmas break rolled around, they were still together, and Eddie had worked really hard to make sure that she and Richie stayed as far apart as possible.

Despite his best efforts, he still caught Richie curled in on himself on the front steps on the library during finals prep.

“Shouldn’t you be rehearsing for your Acting for the Camera final?” Eddie asked, sliding in next to him and putting a tentative hand on his arm.

Richie looked up wildly. His eyes were red, and there were obvious tear tracks on his face.

“Fuck, Eds.” He slumped back over. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay?” Eddie whispered, ignoring his heart hammering in his ears.

“Just stressed,” Richie lied.

They sat in silence like that for a while before Richie finally got up, citing rehearsal.

Eddie didn’t know why it felt like his heart had fallen out of his body for the next few days.

\----

Eddie stayed on campus over Christmas break, citing preparation for student teaching when his mother called him in hysterics.

It was the best Christmas that Eddie had ever had. His eating habits were still not great, but they were more on track than they used to be, and on Christmas, Eddie was able to eat peanut butter for the first time in almost a year without bursting into tears. It was awesome.

Richie and Myra were both back around the first of January, and as it happened, Eddie saw Richie first.

“You made it!” Ben was throwing an after-New Years party for all the people who were elsewhere over Christmas, and had been so kind to invite Eddie. Eddie liked Ben, and so decided to be less of a recluse for the day.

“I did,” Eddie agreed, handing Ben a bottle of wine that he’d brought as a gift.

“Awesome.” Ben accepted the wine gratefully. “Everyone else is inside.”

Eddie’s legs seemed to move of their own accord, bringing him into the living room and across to a group of people crowded around a beer pong table. Richie was at the head of it, laughing loudly at something that Bev was whispering to him.

“Where are the drinks?” Eddie asked, but Ben wasn’t there anymore, so no one responded.

Richie obviously knew where the drinks were; he was very drunk, or high, or something, leaning on Bev and talking even more loudly than he usually did. Eddie stared at him, unable to tear his eyes from the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed.

Even when drunk, Richie seemed to always know when Eddie was nearby. He looked up with a slow, lazy smile, whispered something to Bev, and then pushed his way out of the crowd and up into Eddie’s space.

“Pretty in pink,” he whispered once he felt he was close enough to Eddie (Eddie’s whole brain was whispering ‘ _too close_ ’, but he didn’t move), tugging on the hem of Eddie’s pastel sweater.

“Why are you wearing a windbreaker indoors?” Eddie asked, allowing Richie to slide his hands around and bring Eddie closer. 

“You think it’s sexy,” Richie teased, pulling a hand back around to trace a finger along Eddie’s jaw.

“It’s the least sexy thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Eddie breathed, still frozen to the spot.

“Liar,” Richie smirked, and leaned in to engage Eddie in a filthy kiss. Eddie reciprocated almost immediately - his body was way ahead of his mind - and they wrapped around each other…

...until Eddie remembered.

He pulled off of Richie’s mouth with an embarrassing pop, feeling panicked and trapped.

“Eds,” Richie pleaded, already knowing what Eddie was going to say.

“Myra,” Eddie shook his head, biting back tears. “It’s not fair to Myra.”

“You don’t talk about her at all, Eddie - you don’t care about her at all --”

“I shouldn’t have come here.” Eddie turned and began elbowing his way through the crowd. “I’m leaving now.”

“Spaghetti,” Richie called desperately, but Eddie had reached the kitchen and was already gone.

\----

He broke up with Myra the next week, but the damage with Richie was done.

\----

Student teaching engulfed Eddie’s life almost immediately after it began. Eddie had a placement at one of the local high schools, so he kept his apartment and commuted to both teaching and his once-a-week seminar by bike, and by the time he got back at night, he was about ready to collapse. Seventh graders were awesome and super excited about life, but they were also unruly and dramatic and kind of kicking his ass. Plus, some of them were taller than him, which was...less than ideal.

He didn’t see Richie for a couple of weeks, which he figured was probably for the best.

Then, on a cold Friday in March, his phone dinged with a notification.

**-hey kiddo-**  
**-you around-**  
**-wanna catch a movie and then sneak into a second movie-**

The invitation was so Richie that Eddie couldn’t help but smile.

**-Yeah, I’m free tonight.-**  
**-I might pass out during the second movie, though.-**

Richie’s response was immediate.

**-ill buy you a giant diet coke youll be so hopped on caffeine you wont know what to do-**  
**-first movies at seven-**  
**-ill get you at 645-**

Eddie looked at the clock. It was just past 4.

**-Sounds like a plan.-**

\----

Richie was late, of course, so they were late to the first movie, but Eddie didn’t mind. He was just happy that things were okay enough between them that Richie had invited him out.

Being friends again was really fucking great. Obviously, everything wasn’t back to the way it used to be, but Eddie hadn’t realized how much he had missed Richie’s annoying sex jokes and commentary until Richie started quietly going in on one of the protagonists for making a stupid choice.

“This is nice,” Eddie told him once the first movie was over. “Thanks for inviting me.”

Richie shrugged, and his ears went a little pink. “I missed you, Spaghetti. No one else gets me like you do.”

“Not even Bev?” Eddie asked, genuinely curious.

“Nah.” Richie stood up, leading him towards the second theatre. “Bev’s an awfully good guy for being a girl, but there are some things that even she can’t touch, you know?”

“I know,’ Eddie said, thinking of Bill and nodding.

They ended up sneaking into the wrong theatre for the second movie. Eddie laughed until he cried, sank into his seat, and allowed himself to continue to feel joy.

\----

Richie was far more present after that.

His schedule was pretty booked up, too. He had a senior acting project that he was doing, and Mike had also roped him into doing a second show, so Eddie only got to see him when he wasn’t at rehearsal and Eddie wasn’t at school...which was basically never.

Still, Richie tried to be there for Eddie as much as he possibly could, and vice-versa. Eddie ran lines with Richie late into the night; Richie critiqued Eddie’s lesson plans on days when he had observations, and helped Eddie monitor his food intake in a healthy way. They worked well together, and the rest of their friends were relieved that things weren’t tense anymore.

And if Eddie still caught Richie staring at him sometimes in a way that was obviously less than friendly, well...they’d deal with that later.

Eddie’s last day of student teaching and Richie’s senior acting project landed on the same week. Eddie finished school that Friday with a huge smile, accepted the card and gift of chocolate from his students, and sped on his bike to the theatre building on campus.

Richie was a gift of an actor. His one-man show was funny, sweet, and touching all at once. Eddie was just about ready to burst with pride.

He greeted him afterwards with a gift. “I know it’s not much, Rich, but I wanted to say thank you.”

Richie stared at the vinyl in his hands, obviously overcome with emotion. “You found this for me?!”

“I did,” Eddie laughed. “Not many stores carry Miley Cyrus _records_ , but the internet is a bizarre place, so.”

“I love it,” Richie whispered, clutching it to his chest. “I love her.”

“I know you do,” Eddie said fondly.

“I got you something, too,” Richie said, putting the record down to rummage through his bag. “You like this band, right? The Wailing Jennys? They’re coming here during finals week. I got us tickets.” He procured two pieces of paper, and Eddie felt his own eyes fill with tears.

“Richie, you shouldn’t have.”

“I wanted to,” Richie insisted, looking down at Eddie with soft eyes. “I wanted to.”

They went to McDonald’s after Richie had said hello to everyone he needed to say hello to. Eddie ate all of his fries, and felt happier than he had in a long time.

\----

Before the concert, though, there was Senior Ball to get through.

Senior Ball was the college’s annual end of year dance that was, as the name suggested, exclusively for seniors. Pretty much everyone turned up to it about two hours late, drunk off of their asses. They stayed for approximately fifteen minutes, and then rolled out to the bars.

Eddie wasn’t keen on the idea of going late, but after his friends assured him that they would all be arriving together, he agreed that they could pre-game at Stan, Mike, and Bill’s apartment, and then just...get there when they got there.

He rang their doorbell at 7:45, forty-five minutes after Senior Ball had started and fifteen minutes before he was expected to be there. Fortunately, Bill knew him well enough to know that he would show up early, so they were ready for him.

Mike opened the door, and beamed fondly down at him. “Eddie, you look wonderful. Have you always had that grey suit?”

Eddie blushed and smoothed his hands down the front of his suit jacket. “The purple shirt is old, but the suit is new. I bought it with the money my aunts sent me for Christmas.”

“It looks great.” Mike put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on in.”

Stan and Bill were already dressed, too, and looking very chic in matching black pinstriped suits. Stan whipped out the wine immediately upon seeing Eddie, and the camera about twenty minutes in, and when Mike walked in in, also wearing a black pinstriped suit, the four of them had a mini photoshoot. By the time Bev and Bell showed up, Eddie was half-drunk and curled up on the couch, laughing his ass off and not caring, for once, about how late everyone was - how late _he_ was.

Bev, as always, rolled in with tunes, and so soon they were all jumping up and down, sweating in their fancy clothes and having a senior ball of their very own to the tune of Bev’s 80’s playlist. Eddie didn’t know what the other undergrads were doing across campus, but he was pretty sure that this was better, one hundred percent.

Richie walked in when Eddie and Stan were in the middle of a passionate lip sync of It’s Raining Men. Bill was watching with rapt interest, Mike was crying with laughter on the floor, Bev and Ben were attempting interpretive dance in the background....and Richie, beautiful in a pink dress shirt and fitted pants, slipped quietly over and sat on the couch, amused and fond.

After the song ended, Eddie found his way over to him immediately.

“You look great,” he said, joy bubbling out of him. “Richie, pink looks so good on you!”

“You, too, Spaghetti.” Richie adjusted his glasses shyly. “You guys ready to go?”

“Wait!” Mike called out, scrambling for the camera. “Group picture!”

They arranged themselves in the front hallway of the apartment, and Mike set up the camera timer. Eddie curled his fist in the front of Richie’s shirt, felt the weight of Ben’s arm on his other side, and smiled a huge, genuine smile.

Mike checked the picture, gave a thumbs up, and then they were off, wandering as a group into the night.

“So this is gonna be super lame, right?” Richie sidled up to Eddie at the back of the group. Mike, Stan, and Bill were in the front, and Bev and Ben were together in the middle.

“I’m drunk enough that I don’t care,” Eddie admitted. “Did you even have anything at Stan, Bill, and Mike’s?”

“I smoked before I showed,” Richie smiled, slinging an arm around Eddie’s shoulders. “Alcohol’s fine sometimes, but usually not my thing, you know?”

Eddie didn’t really know, but he nodded anyway.

“We’ve arrived!” announced Bill, gesturing broadly towards the campus center. Eddie had to admit, they’d done good work with it - there were fairy lights up and down the brick exterior, and music was thumping softly from inside.

“Nice,” Richie whistled. He turned to Eddie with an excited smile. “C’mon, Eds, let’s get our dance on.”

“It’s been three years, and you still won’t use my real name,” Eddie laughed, following after Richie as he bounded up the stairs past the rest of their friends.

Eddie barely had time to examine the inside of the campus center before Richie was dragging him by the arm, leading him to where the music was playing, and jumping up and down to the beat of whatever fast pop song the DJ had put on. Richie was a terrible dancer; he had absolutely no coordination at all, and he looked a little bit like an inflatable balloon man whenever he tried, but Eddie was so lost in the excitement of it all that he joined in, jumping in (what he considered to be) a more coordinated way alongside Richie.

Then, as was to be expected, a slow song came on. The only thing that would have made the moment more cliche was that song that always seemed to be playing in Richie’s room, but the DJ just didn’t have that kind of taste.

Eddie swallowed hard and looked at Richie, expecting him to be winding down and leaving, but instead, he was holding out a hand.

“For old times sake?” Richie asked, smiling a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Eddie knew that he shouldn’t let himself fall into this trap. He was so close, now. He couldn’t risk everything on feelings that he should have buried a long time ago…

...but he was taking Richie’s hand, and letting himself be drawn in. Richie pulled him flush against his chest, and Eddie closed his eyes and leaned his head against Richie’s shoulder, all but collapsing into the embrace. They swayed wordlessly for a moment, neither wanting to broach the topic of ‘what they were doing’ and ‘why they shouldn’t be doing it’.

And then, Stan was there.

“No, no, no.” Stan grabbed Richie by the back of his shirt and yanked him backwards. “Bad idea, both of you.”

“Stanthony,” Richie protested, looking at Eddie helplessly.

“Downstairs, now.” Stan snapped and pointed to the door, and Richie and Eddie slowly shuffled towards it.

Just like that, the mood of the night was ruined.

Eddie felt like he could explode with the words he wasn’t going to be able to say, but he weathered out the rest of the night with his friends anyway, joining forces with Bill to fend off his old girlfriend Audra instead of spending more time with Richie.

More than once, he caught Bev looking at him piteously, but he didn’t want to think about that, so he ignored her every time she tried.

When they eventually rolled out to the bars as per tradition, Eddie sat on the opposite end of their friends from Richie, and willed himself not to feel sad about it.

\----

The Wailing Jennys concert was two weeks later.

“Why did you get a ticket for yourself?” Eddie asked Richie as they walked downtown. “I didn’t think you liked this band.”

“I wanted you to have someone to go with,” Richie said, smiling and shoving his hands in his pockets. “Being alone at a concert sucks.”

“I mean, I guess.” Eddie was touched by Richie’s thoughtfulness, even if he had been secretly hoping that Richie had been listening to the Wailing Jennys because he knew that Eddie liked them. “I’m sorry in advance if you get bored.”

“I won’t be bored,” Richie assured him. “I’ll be with you.”

Eddie willed himself not to blush, and instead rolled his eyes.

“Let’s see if you say that after a couple of songs, nerd.” They were at the front door of the venue, and Eddie looked back at Richie expectantly. “There’s no turning back now.”

“Lead the way, cowboy,” Richie said, pulling the crumpled tickets out of his pocket and waving Eddie forward.

About two and a half songs in, Richie leaned over to begin his commentary. “It doesn’t surprise me in the fucking slightest that you like these women, Eds. This is like Taylor Swift’s country phase on crack.”

“It was her best phase,” Eddie said defensively. “And not everyone listens exclusively to Party in the USA, asshole.”

“No, but this might just be the Nashville party that Miley was talking about.”

“Miley’s fake country,” Eddie hissed, “and anyway, this is folk.”

“I know,” Richie laughed, pleased to have gotten a rise out of Eddie, “and I like it, Eds, I swear I do. It’s just so…”

“So what, Richie?” Eddie folded his arms across his chest and silently dared Richie to insult him.

“So you,” Richie finished fondly. “It’s cute.”

A blush rose to Eddie’s cheeks, and he cursed his traitorous body for betraying emotion. It was only one more week to graduation, and then job interviews, and then...maybe then…

“This is a cover of an old song that we like very much.” Ruth Moody interrupted Eddie’s thoughts, smiling out at the crowd as the people behind her messed around with their instruments. “We thought it fit with our vibe, so to speak, so here it goes. Y’all like Tom Petty?”

Richie’s cheer was maybe the loudest in the whole arena.

“Good.” Ruth adjusted her microphone. “Here’s our version of his song Wildflowers.”

Richie gave a quick little jolt at that, and slid his hand over to find Eddie’s. Eddie couldn’t help but allow it, given the sad, sweet look that had made its way over Richie’s face.

“What’s wrong, Rich?” he asked, running his thumb over Richie’s soothingly.

“Just...an old favorite of mine,” Richie said quietly, and as they started to play, Eddie found that he did recognize it. It was the song that was always playing when Richie was around - at the party, when they’d kissed for the first time, and then again when Eddie spent the night with Richie before he left for Israel…

Eddie had never bothered to put a name to the tune, he just knew that it was Richie’s song. He liked that it was Wildflowers, though. That seemed to suit him.

“My mom used to sing this to me when I was little,” Richie continued, hand gripping Eddie’s tightly. “I guess it’s always felt like it was about me, you know? Like Tom Petty is singing directly to me.”

Eddie held tight in response, and closed his eyes.

_You belong with your love on your arm; you belong somewhere you feel free._

“I know what you mean, Richie,” he said, heart hammering against his ribcage. “I know exactly what you mean.”

\----

Eddie, to his utmost surprise, managed to line up a job before he graduated. He was hired at one of the local high schools to teach ninth grade English and a drama elective (which was fucking hysterical, all things considered). When he got the call, he accepted with grace, and then immediately hung up and ran outside of his apartment to whoop and scream.

He was free. He never had to go back to Sonia again - even for the summer. His lease for the apartment he was currently in ended in the middle of July, which gave him plenty of time to get a new place without stooping to moving back in with her. He no longer had to be her prisoner. Now she could pay someone for that - and she was, she had a live-in nurse now that she absolutely hated.

The nurse picked up the phone when he called to tell her the news. “Hello?”

“Hey, Maria, is my mom there?”

“Eddie?” There was jostling on Maria’s end. “If you don’t visit soon, I think she’s going to burn down the house.”

“Yeah, bad news on that front,” Eddie said, feeling a little sorry for the woman.

“Oy ve,” Maria groaned, but she didn’t sound mad. “I’ll put her on.”

A few seconds of silence passed, and then Sonia’s screeching voice rang through the line. “You never call anymore, Edward!”

“I’m calling now, mom,” he said patiently. “I got a job.”

“In Maine?” she asked immediately.

“In Massachusetts,” Eddie corrected her, smiling. “I’m staying here.”

Sonia immediately burst into tears.

“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME, EDWARD? LEAVING ME ALONE IN MY TIME OF DISTRESS--”

“You’ll be okay, mama. Maria’s good to you.” Eddie paused, thinking. “You’re not coming to graduation, right?”

“You know I can’t,” Sonia said miserably. “There’s no way I could be transported in my condition.”

“Then I’ll be sure to visit in the summer,” Eddie said, keeping his wording intentionally vague. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Eddieeeeee,” she cried, but he knew better to fall for her manipulations. He hung up.

Richie had not been so lucky as to procure a job right away. He was headed back to his parents in California, much to his dismay.

“I love Mags, honest to God,” he told the rest of them during a lunch on the lawn at the beginning of senior week, “but if I don’t get out of that house sooner rather than later, Went and I might actually kill each other.”

“You got work you’re thinking about doing?” Stan had lined up some kind of professional internship or apprenticeship or whatever at the Walnut Street Theatre in Pennsylvania. Mike and Bill were going with him - Bill to pursue his Masters in English at UPenn, and Mike to work for an inner-city nonprofit that taught nutrition and health to underprivileged children. (Mike’s parents worked on a farm, and he was excited to be doing something that both he loved and they understood.) “It’s better to have a plan.”

“Yeah, there’s a kids theatre in Half Moon Bay that I can help out at for a while.” Richie flopped onto his back, blowing his unruly hair out of his face. “I just really don’t know how I wanna approach all this, you know?”

“Relatable,” Bev called. She was going to continue to camp out in Ben’s apartment, but that was all she had laid out for the future last anyone had heard.

“Richie?” Eddie turned to face him, feeling a little bit sentimental and a little bit nauseous. “Do you think you’ll ever come back out here? To the East Coast, I mean?”

Richie pretended to think for a minute. “Will you be here, Spaghetti?”

“Probably forever,” Eddie admitted.

“Then I’ll be back,” Richie said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Eddie wished more than anything that it would be that simple in practice.

\----

Graduation day was sunny, sweet, and perfect.

Eddie wasn’t seated by any of his friends, of course, given that they were arranged in alphabetical order by last name. The closest he came was to Mike, who was two rows over and a couple of kids down - he had no hope of even seeing Richie and Stan, who were buried somewhere in the back.

Still, their support for one another was pervasive. No one cheered louder for Bill, Bev, Mike, Stan, Richie, or Eddie than their remaining friends in the audience. Eddie remembered an old saying, ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’, and was struck with the thought that maybe it was inevitable that they’d all come together this way. Maybe their group was destined.

Maybe...he and Richie were destined.

Except that Richie was moving, and who knew when he would be back.

They all took pictures together after the ceremony. Bev’s aunt was particularly jazzed about the occasion, and took somewhere upwards of 2,000 photos. Eddie asked her to send him some for him to send to Sonia, and as soon as she learned he was parentless at his own graduation, she practically adopted him too. 

Before he knew it, he had plans to go to dinner with Ben, Bev, and Bev’s Aunt Marsh.

Richie had been invited, too, but had been forced to turn down the invite because he was leaving that night with Went and Maggie. He hadn’t let Eddie meet them; he’d just hustled him down the street and told him to have fun with the rest of the gang.

Eddie had secretly hoped for a more sentimental goodbye. He turned and watched for a minute before leaving to find the Marsh clan, and felt his heart clench when he heard Richie laughing with a woman he didn’t recognize - probably Maggie Tozier.

He thought about going back to take Richie’s hands one last time - to hold him, maybe even to kiss him goodbye.

He didn’t go back. He turned and marched forward, forward, forward into the future.

\----

He got a postcard from Richie in late July. The front had a picture of seals at La Jolla Beach on it.

The text on the back was short and simple:

_It’s lonely here without you._

Eddie felt his eyes burn hot with tears, and reached for his phone.

**-Couldn’t have texted me, asshole?-**

The response came within fifteen minutes.

**-not a romantic bone in your body is there-**

Eddie scoffed and tossed the phone to the side.

\---

He didn’t actually see Richie again until Valentine’s Day.

Eddie didn’t know why Richie was in town, and significantly, Eddie didn’t know why Richie was around for Valentine’s Day, but that was when Richie announced that he was coming to visit, and so that was when Eddie cleared his schedule and waited for Richie to turn up in his house.

Richie, as always, was late.

“I’m sorry, Eds,” he apologized, stumbling into Eddie’s unlocked apartment at a quarter to two in the morning. “I had to get blitzed before I got here.”

“Why, Rich?” Eddie asked, exasperated and fond. “Why the fuck would you need to be drunk to be in my apartment?”

“You know why,” he said, and slunk off to the guest room.

Eddie didn’t know why. He didn’t learn why until the next day: Richie was dating a girl he’d met at a Barnes and Noble, and had withheld that information from Eddie on purpose so that Eddie wouldn’t, quote, ‘go crazy murder pants on me’.

Eddie screamed at him for the better part of an hour about how it didn’t matter (lie), he was totally over whatever they had (lie), and that he should really tell him about shit like that because weren’t they supposed to be friends? (That was the biggest lie of all. They’d never been friends, not really. Their whole relationship had always been romantically charged.)

Richie responded to that by shutting himself back up in the guest bedroom.

It was not the best visit they’d ever had, not by a long shot.

\---

It took them a whole year’s worth of sporadic texts and even more sporadic phone calls to make arrangements to see each other again.

This time, they met in New York. Richie was there to look at graduate schools for youth theatre (he’d actually really loved his time in Half Moon Bay, and wanted to do more work in that vein), and Eddie was able to make a day trip to meet up with him.

Eddie almost chickened out of the rendezvous before it even began. He had something akin to a panic attack on the train, because his feelings were as strong as they’d ever been and he couldn’t take having his heart ripped up like it had been last time.

He went, though, and connected with Richie against his better judgement. Richie was as beautiful and good-hearted as ever...but less talkative now than he had been in undergrad. It took some coaxing to get him to discuss what was going on in his life.

“I’m at a theatre closer to San Francisco, now,” he said, finally. “I’m teaching classes and mostly doing tech stuff, so it’s not ideal...which is why I’m looking into this.”

“I like the idea of you with kids,” Eddie admitted shyly, watching Richie’s reflection in the subway window.

“Right?” Richie smiled, big and genuine. “I always thought that you’d cornered the market on that, Spaghetti. How are yours, anyway?”

“Mine are okay,” Eddie said, shuddering at the reminder of papers to grade and lesson plans to create. “It’s not perfect, but at least I’m not living with Sonia anymore.”

“Seeing anyone?” Richie asked cautiously. There was a lack of urgency in his tone that made Eddie’s stomach fill up with dread, for whatever reason.

“No,” Eddie responded, a little embarrassed. _How could he date anyone else when he knew that Richie Tozier was in the world?_ “You still with Maeve?”

“Sandy, now,” Richie corrected, fondness taking over his expression.

“Who’s Sandy?” Eddie asked, a little more sharply than he probably should have. Richie raised an eyebrow, but did not reply.

When they said goodbye at Grand Central that night, Eddie was struck with a paralyzing understanding.

This time, Richie wasn’t coming back.

\----

Slowly but surely, Richie’s messages slowed to a trickle, to the point where a year after the New York City meetup, Eddie was lucky if he heard from Richie maybe once every four months.

He asked after him, sure. He texted regularly with Bill, Mike, and Ben, and they gave him updates. Apparently, Richie had chosen Central Florida for grad school. Apparently, his girlfriend Sandy was way more serious than he’d let on, and she’d moved down there with him.

Apparently, Richie was happier than he’d ever been in his life.

Eddie figured he should be happy for Richie too, but there wasn’t really a point in lying to himself.

The final nail in the coffin shouldn’t have been a surprise - and it wasn’t, not really, but it was virtually catastrophic nevertheless.

An Instagram picture. Two hands enclasped. A ring.

Eddie tossed his phone into the passenger seat of his car like he’d been burned, and sat there for a few minutes, unable to process what he’d seen.

Where the fuck had they gone wrong?

He turned on the car radio for noise, and of course, Miley Cyrus was singing...and of course, it was the song he needed to hear the absolute least in that moment.

_Run away, go find a lover. Run away, let your heart be your guide._

It was as much Eddie’s fault as it was Richie’s, but it didn’t seem fair that Eddie should be the only one feeling this way.

_You deserve the deepest of cover. You belong in that home by and by._

But then, Richie had already felt this way, hadn’t he? For once, Richie had been the one that had been early.

_You belong among the wildflowers. You belong somewhere close to me._

The one time it had actually mattered, Eddie Kaspbrak had been late...too late.

_Far away from your troubles and worries - you belong somewhere you feel free._

Eddie closed his eyes and leaned his head back, letting the truth of the words wash over him; letting the tears come.

He should have known it would end like this.

Both of them had such fucking bad timing.

_You belong somewhere you feel free._

Eddie reached his hand up and jabbed at the buttons on his car radio, changing the station.

It was time to reconfigure his internal clock.

**Author's Note:**

> Tom Petty's version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngYenAbgkr8
> 
> and Miley's version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QF1alJRw-c
> 
> and all of this because sometimes, you just can't make it work.
> 
> skeletonscribbles.tumblr.com


End file.
